Steven Scarpa has an article for the Record-Journal (Meriden, CT), All in the Family: Middle School Teacher Traces His Roots, about a person researching their family’s history – it’s a good little article covering amateur genealogists, and one of those signs of how mainstream genealogy is fast becoming. The focus of the article, Gary O’Neil, mentions how difficult it can be at times, as well as the fact that it’s not a simple “sit down an do it in a few weekends” kind of project. It’s a positive article about genealogy and how popular it’s becoming.
Excerpt:
Where do my people come from? It is a question most people ask of themselves at some point in their lives. For some, finding the answer is very simple — talking to relatives, a trip to the local city hall or thumbing through a family Bible covers most of the basics.
Gary O’Neil, a teacher at Washington Middle School, became interested in his family history as a child listening to his great-grandmother’s stories and cataloguing her photographs before she died. The stories stayed with him.